Biblical

by Christopher Galt

  Silverman came sprinting back up the corridor with an over-weight, shaven-headed man in a white short-sleeved shirt and black pants.

  “There’s an ambulance on its way …” The security man stared unbelievingly at Elmes. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know, but stay back … he’s violent with it.”

  Still Elmes stumbled around, patting his way along the wall towards his colleagues who watched, ready to grab him should he fall.

  “God …” said Silverman. “It’s like he’s gone blind …”

  “Help me!” Elmes yelled desperately. “For God’s sake help me!” He began stamping his feet, performing a bizarre dance as if trying to shake something loose from his legs. His eyes were wild, watching something terrifying, something monstrous, that only he could see.

  He screamed. A scream like no other that Hudson had ever heard: a high-pitched, inhuman whine that was no longer about fear, but about pain. Falling to the floor, Elmes began writhing, clawing, convulsing – all the time to the terrible music of that inhuman scream. He flailed and tore wildly at his clothes, kicking and twisting on the polished floor.

  It was then that Hudson and the others saw it happen.

  Elmes’s skin – on his face, on his hands, on the chest laid bare by his frantic tearing at his shirt – turned crimson. It bubbled and peeled, then began to blacken.

  “Jesus!” said Hudson. “He’s burning … He really is burning.” But there were still no flames, no smoke, no signs of combustion outside Elmes’s tortured body. The scream became something else: a thick, treacle gargle. Now they could smell the overpowering, sickly sweet stench of Elmes’s roasted flesh.

  Hudson turned to the security man. “For Christ’s sake get a bucket of water.”

  “But there’s no fire …”

  “To throw on him, you idiot.” Without the slightest idea what he could do to help him, Hudson dropped the red file he’d been carrying and rushed forward to kneel beside where Elmes lay on the floor. He was no longer convulsing: his movements were small and tight. His skin was gone, the exposed flesh a mix of red raw and black crust. The thick hair on his head fizzed and crackled to sparse patches of blackened wire. Hudson could see gray-white subcutaneous fat bubble and boil. Eyelids gone, Elmes’s eyes were shrunken, desiccated. No more movement. Hudson tried to check for a pulse but drew his hand back as if stung, the blackened flesh hot and burning his fingertips.

  He straightened up and watched as the now dead Elmes curled up into a blackened gargoyle, the contraction of driedout tendons drawing up his legs, twisting tight his arms and making claws of what was left of his fingers.

  Hudson heard Silverman retching and the security man’s voice: sounds that seemed to come from a million miles away. He was also aware of distressed, alarmed voices as others from the building gathered behind him.

  “What happened to him?” the security man asked again.

  “I don’t know …” said Hudson. “I have no idea. I thought he was having one of those hallucinations, but this was no hallucination. Spontaneous combustion, maybe … but I thought that was a myth. No one has ever actually documented it …”

  “That was no fucking myth …” said the security man. “That was real …”

  Hudson realized the security man was right. It was the only thing that made sense. Hudson was confused, in shock, disbelieving. And what added to his disbelief and disgust was the way a single thought penetrated all of those feelings. A thought that was unworthy of him, unworthy of anyone.

  No one has ever actually documented it. If only I’d had a camera crew with me.

  38

  JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON

  When Corbin called Walt Ramirez from his office, the CHP officer apologized for the short notice but explained he was planning to fly in the next day, and asked if he could interview Deborah when he got in, perhaps seeing Macbeth after that.

  “You’re in luck,” said Corbin. “I’m at McLean now with Dr Macbeth. I’ll put him on.” He handed the phone to Macbeth, who made arrangements with Ramirez.

  “You okay with me sitting in?” he asked Corbin when he handed back the phone.

  “Sure. Like I said, I’d value your insight and I don’t think we’re there yet with a diagnosis. Anyway, this connection with Melissa means you have a personal interest and I have to admit I don’t like cops interviewing patients during treatment.”

  “Ramirez sounds okay,” said Macbeth. “Has the FBI been in touch?”

  “The FBI?”

  “Yeah. I was approached by a Special Agent Bundy—”

  “An FBI man called Bundy? You’re kidding me …”

  “We had a cozy tête-à-tête in the back of his car the other day. And it’s not just his name that you would remember – he has very striking eyes: the most defined case of central heterochromia I’ve seen.”

  “I can honestly say I’d remember any visit from the FBI, far less one from someone with dual-colored eyes and a serial-killer surname. What’s his interest?”

  “Cults. Fringe groups. John Astor.”

  “There’s a connection?”

  “It would seem Bundy believes there is, but I told him he was way off base with any idea that Melissa would be involved with a cult.”

  “The Melissa you knew, John. The Melissa Debbie knew seems to have been a very different person.”

  Macbeth nodded glumly as the press snapshot of a relaxed and happy Melissa with Samuel Tennant flashed in his recall.

  “What about the WHO team?” Corbin changed the subject. “You going to collaborate with them?”

  “As much as I can. The Copenhagen Project demands all of my time. And my boss, Georg Poulsen, sure as hell raised a lot of objections to me coming to Boston in the first place, even though I’m here on Project business. He’s made it very clear he wants me back on Project One as of yesterday. I’m telling you, he’s got to be the most driven man I’ve ever worked with, almost like he’s got some personal as well as a professional stake in the Project.”

  “What kind of personal stake?”

  Macbeth shrugged. “He’s one of the most aggressively private men I’ve ever known. I learned quickly not to ask about anything outside Project business.”

  “Surely he understands how important it is to get to the bottom of these events?”

  “He’s convinced the Project supersedes everything else. But I have to admit I’d like to help pin down what the hell is going on.” Macbeth paused, as if unsure whether to commit his next thought to words. “You see, Pete, I have a personal interest in finding out what’s behind this phenomenon.”

  “Oh?”

  “Right at the start of all of this, you told me about a female patient who had come to you having suffered one of these hallucinations. You said that she ‘met’ a younger version of herself, and that she could remember having the experience as a young woman, from the other perspective. Remember?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you remember the day you decided to become a psychiatrist, Pete? I mean the exact moment?”

  “Not really … I kind of drifted into it, following my interests once I qualified. I guess I always had a leaning towards neuroscience.”

  “Me, I wanted to be a psychiatrist since I was a kid,” said Macbeth. “I remember the exact day, when I asked my dad what he did for a living. I was about eleven or twelve. He did a lot of his work from home, out on the Cape, and I used to go into his study a lot … When I think back, I must have really distracted him from his work, but he never complained. I’d come in with my books and encyclopedias and a dozen questions about planets and countries and dinosaurs … He always smiled and told me to sit and answered them.

  “Anyway, this day I asked him what it was he did. I mean, I knew he was a psychiatrist, but I didn’t really know what that meant.”

  “And what did he say?”

  Macbeth smiled at the recollection. “He told me that every living person had a mind, and every mind is
like a universe, filled with billions of thoughts like stars. He said each person is at the center of his or her own unique universe shaped out of all of their unique experiences and knowledge, everything they have ever seen or heard or felt, even read or learned. He told me that sometimes that universe can be a lonely and frightening place. Sometimes people get confused about what is real and what isn’t, what they remember and what they imagine. He said that being a psychiatrist was like being an astronaut: exploring each mind and finding new places and new wonders, and letting each patient know that they’re not alone.”

  “Pretty good description, if you ask me,” said Corbin. “And that convinced you to become a psychiatrist?”

  “No. There was something else. While he told me all that, there was someone else in the room. I hadn’t seen him when I came in but then I saw him: a man sitting in the corner, watching and listening.”

  “A patient?”

  “My father never treated patients at home. Then I realized that Dad couldn’t see the man in the corner. Only I could see him. And the man in the corner could see me. Listen, Pete … I’ve never told anyone this, only Casey.”

  Corbin nodded. “Go on …”

  “I thought the man in the corner was a ghost. I told my dad about him and he asked me where the man was and what he was doing. I explained that he was just sitting, listening to us. Dad told me there were no such things as ghosts, but that sometimes the mind could invent things. He stayed very calm, but I know now that he must have been running through a dozen diagnoses in his head. He told me that I was a very bright boy and that I read a lot of things, a lot of facts, and that sometimes the brain could become overloaded. He came over to me and put his hands on my shoulders and made me look him straight in the eye, telling me not to look over at the man until he told me to. He explained to me that I was tired and had been out in the sun too much and that when a brain gets tired it gets confused and puts things you see together in the wrong order. He told me there was no man in the corner, that it was just a trick of my mind. He said that when I looked again the man would be gone. I did look and the man was gone.

  “That was what convinced me to become a psychiatrist. I had experienced for myself the way the brain can deceive, how it can make the unreal seem real; and how a psychiatrist can show the way back to reality.”

  “Wow …” Corbin shook his head slowly. “You know how easily these things – isolated delusions or hallucinations – can happen in childhood and adolescence. I’m assuming it was isolated … Did you see the man again?”

  “You asked me why I was so interested in your patient. That’s why … because I have seen him again. Exactly the same man I saw that day sitting in the corner of my father’s study. For the last five years I’ve seen him every day: every morning when I look in the mirror to shave. It was me, Pete. Me as I am now.”

  39

  MARKUS. GERMANY

  There were twenty of them, not including the driver: sixteen school students and four teachers. Markus Schwab, who normally never approached anything with eagerness or haste, made sure he was first on the bus. His alacrity had not been inspired by the idea of the school trip, and certainly not by any enthusiasm for its destination, simply that he wanted to get to the back of the coach so that he was assured the rearmost seat by the window.

  It wasn’t that Markus hated his schoolmates; in fact, for a seventeen-year-old, he was markedly lacking in the venom of adolescence: he did not hate his life, he did not hate his parents, his teachers or his schoolmates. It was simply that they bored him: their enthusiasms, their crazes, the way they jabbered on about things that meant so much to them but really didn’t mean anything at all, their obsession with inconsequence – that was what would have angered Markus if he could have summoned up the energy to care.

  So Markus made sure he got the seat at the back of the coach, next to the window. That way, he could turn to the glass and watch the world slide by, the earphones of his MP3 player filling his skull with music.

  This trip, it had been explained to the students, was particularly important given everything that was happening with Europe. History was becoming shared. The context for every nineteenth- and twentieth-century event was now seen as that of the prolonged birth pangs of a new nation. Europe was no longer just a geographical term, it was an identity.

  “You young people,” Herr Hartz, who taught history, had explained before they set out for the coach, “are living at a time of massive significance. When I was your age, Germany had just reunited and what it meant to be German, and Germany’s place in the world, changed overnight. You young people will be the first generation for whom being European and Europe’s new place in the world will be more important than a sense of being German. What we will see today underlines why such progress is important. Why narrow nationalism is the greatest evil in political thought.”

  Blah, blah, blah …

  Markus had listened to Hartz’s pre-trip speech with the same dull indifference with which he listened to all of his lessons. School was a redundant social construct and the man was a bore. Markus didn’t resent him for his dullness: he was a school-teacher and ipso facto his intellect was blunted and scopeless.

  Ipso facto.

  Despite his best efforts, languages, dead and alive, interested Markus and he had excelled at them. The truth was that he had excelled at most subjects and it annoyed him that he was not convinced enough in his own ennui to fail academically. But that was where the paradox lay for Markus: to fail would take effort, to succeed was easy. At least that was the excuse he allowed himself to avoid the inner shame of taking some kind of bourgeois pride in the achievement of socially expected goals.

  But for today, he achieved both of his goals: the seat at the back and the isolation it afforded. There were more seats in the coach than passengers and everyone else had clumped together at the front of the bus, leaving Markus to his little empire of bench and window.

  The journey, Hartz monotoned, would take two and a quarter hours, and they would stop for lunch en route. As soon as the teacher took his seat, Markus plugged in his earphones and turned his attention to the world outside. Two and a quarter hours. One hundred and thirty-five minutes of isolation. Despite himself, he felt a small contentment warm his chest.

  Once they were under way, Markus pressed the play button on his MP3 player and watched the suburbs of Stuttgart pass through his window of attention. A house would appear, sometimes a figure in a doorway, coming out of a driveway car or working in a garden, the hint of a life before and after its brief flicker across the shield of the bus’s automotive glass. Markus didn’t find his detachment from the passing world strange or concerning; to him, it was as natural as any state of being could be.

  One of the secrets he kept from the world was the music he listened to. His peers seemed united in their love for industrial metal: comically dark lyrics to harsh, dissonant grinding; the perfect accompaniment, he supposed, to adolescence. Markus, in contrast, listened to a wide variety of musical forms but mainly, as he did now, Bach. The irony was not wasted on Markus, who had no interest in the past and for whom history was the dullest subject on a dull curriculum, that he listened to music written over two and a half centuries before. He reconciled this paradox by telling himself that the music belonged to his time, not Bach’s. As far as he was concerned and like all knowledge and all arts, it simply came into existence at the time he, Markus Schwab, first discovered it.

  Beyond the window, the houses thinned out and the trees thickened to the accompaniment of the Brandenburg Concertos. The road took the bus along the bank of the Neckar: the river to the right, the side Markus sat on, and steeply rising vineyards to the left. It was an agreeable day, the sun making the water sparkle, the sky pleasantly flecked with wisps of cloud. Everything looked satisfyingly manicured and clean: Nature in Man’s dominion.

  They stopped in Ulm for lunch. It was a cafeteria-type affair and Markus was forced to share a table with Imke Paulig and
two of her idiotic friends. The trio sat and exchanged handshielded laughs and whispers, their faces empty and stupid. Occasionally, Imke would throw what was clearly meant to be a meaningful look in Markus’s direction. He ignored her, which seemed only to encourage her.

  Their hushed whispers became more urgent and serious at one point and Markus could not help eavesdropping as he pretended to look out the window. The girls were talking about the news from Boston, in the United States, where there was some kind of strange virus making people have vivid daydreams – seeing things that weren’t there, such as hundreds of people experiencing an earthquake that did not really take place. But it wasn’t just happening in Boston.

  “You know what I think?” said Stefanie, Imke’s dark-haired friend. “I think it’s all the drugs the Americans take. It’s maybe all caused by some new drug that’s gone wrong.”

  Markus could not contain himself. He turned to the girls. “Yeah … I heard that too. And there’s another new drug … here in Germany. This one is even more dangerous.”

  “Really?” asked Stefanie, leaning forward.

  “Yeah …” said Markus. “It has these terrible side effects … apparently it affects both your brain and your anus. All of your shit goes into your brain and you start thinking with your asshole.”

  Stefanie got up and left the table. The others followed her, Imke last of all.

  “You know something, Markus,” she said as she left, “if anyone’s the asshole it’s you.”

  Markus shrugged a give-a-shit shrug and watched Imke’s back as she crossed the cafeteria; but he knew, despite himself, that he did give a shit about what Imke thought of him.

  He noticed that Herr Hartz had intercepted the girls, clearly having seen that there had been some kind of incident. The history teacher started to head in Markus’s direction, a casual idling walk cast as clumsy disguise over his mission. He sat down next to Markus.